THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 James J. McBride 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Margaret McBride
 
 Books in 
 General
 
 BOOKS OF ESSAYS 
 
 THE MERRY-GO-ROUND 
 by Carl Van Vechten 
 
 MUSIC AND BAD MANNERS 
 by Carl Van Vechten 
 
 A BOOK OF CALUMNY 
 by H. L. Mencken 
 
 A BOOK OF PREFACES 
 by H. L. Mencken 
 
 PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES 
 by H. L. Mencken 
 
 PAVANNES AND DIVISIONS 
 by Ezra Pound 
 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, Publisher
 
 Books in General 
 By Solomon Eagle 
 
 Alfred- A Knopf 
 
 New York Mcmxix
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. 
 
 PRINTED IN TH UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
 ARTURO WAUGH
 
 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 ex- 
 plain, 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, 13 
 
 Political Songs, 19 
 
 An Oriental on Albert the Good, 25 
 
 Epigrams, 31 
 
 An Eminent Baconian, 37 
 
 The Beauties of Badness, 42 
 
 More Badness, 54 
 
 A Mystery Solved, 58 
 
 Carrying the Alliance too far, 60 
 
 May 1914, 63 
 
 May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition, 69 
 
 The Mantle of Sir Edwin, 75 
 
 " The Cattle of the Boyne," 81 
 
 August 1914, 83 
 
 Mrs. Barclay sees it through, 88 
 
 A Topic of Standing Interest, 94 
 
 Was Cromwell an Alligator?, 99 
 
 The Depressed Philanthropist, 105 
 
 A Polyphloisboisterous Critic, 1 1 1 
 
 "Another Century, and then . . .," 115 
 
 Herrick, 121 
 
 The Muse in Liquor, 127 
 
 5 Misspent, 133 
 
 Shakespeare's Women and Mr. George Moore, 
 
 137 
 
 Moving a Library, 143
 
 Contents 
 
 Table-Talk and Jest Books, 146 
 
 Stephen Phillips, 150 
 
 Gray and Horace Walpole, 155 
 
 A Horrible Bookseller, 161 
 
 The Troubles of a Catholic, 166 
 
 The Bible as Raw Material, 168 
 
 How to avoid Bad English, 172 
 
 Woodland Creatures, 177 
 
 Other People's Books, 183 
 
 Peacock, 187 
 
 Wordsworth's Personal Dullness, 189 
 
 Henry James's Obscurity, 195 
 
 The " Ring " in the Bookselling Trade, 201 
 
 Music-Hall Songs, 207 
 
 More Music-Hall Songs, 213 
 
 Utopias, 218 
 
 Charles II in English Verse, 224 
 
 The Most Durable Books, 229 
 
 The Worst Style in the World, 234 
 
 The Reconstruction of Orthography, 240 
 
 Mr. James Joyce, 245 
 
 Tennessee, 251 
 
 Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George, 254 
 
 Stranded, 259 
 
 Mr. Ralph Hodgson, 264 
 
 Double Misprints, 268 
 
 The History of Earl Pumbles, 270 
 
 On Destroying Books, 276
 
 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 Encyclopaedia. 
 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 re- 
 main embedded until sleep or a visitor comes to haul 
 me out. A man will read things in the Encyclo- 
 paedia that he would never dream of looking at else- 
 where 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 dia- 
 grams which illustrate the article on Metaphysico- 
 
 13
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 resented the possession by the other 
 of a similar, and unusual, surname. Then I was in 
 the thick of it. There was nothing especially ex- 
 citing 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 demon- 
 strator in Comparative Obstetrics at the Robson In- 
 stitute? Or that the Bishop of the Cocos Islands 
 has been five times married and was educated at
 
 Who's Who 
 
 King Edward VI Grammar School, Chipping Ches- 
 ter, 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 clos- 
 ing 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 auto- 
 biographies, in spite of their compression, 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 collect- 
 ing 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 ex- 
 tremely capable; and the contributors seem to be 
 as uniform in their veracity as they are various in 
 their loquacity. Only in rare circumstances could 
 
 15
 
 Books in General 
 
 any one hope to impose on Who's Who without very 
 rapid detection. An opportunity 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 con- 
 ductors 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 be- 
 yond that not a word of truth did I tell. I in- 
 vented for myself a career, a career not imposing 
 enough to arouse suspicions, but far more pictur- 
 esque 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 Amer- 
 ican 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 
 16
 
 Who's Who 
 
 enough to put down the names of one or two of 
 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 convinc- 
 ingly modest a claim as that. Each year, as I say, 
 I lived laborious days in the delineation of an imag- 
 inary 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 nationality, down to the most back- 
 ward 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 deliberation, I tore up the 
 well-filled sheet and destroyed again my other self, 
 my American self, the romantic self who had done 
 
 17
 
 Books in General 
 
 the things I had 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. 
 
 IS
 
 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 politicians 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 
 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. 
 
 19
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 Pro- 
 tection "; 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. rt 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." Cau- 
 cus-provided laws may be all right, but caucus-pro- 
 vided songs, written by party agents and under- 
 secretaries, are not successful. 
 
 The chief characteristic of the Liberal songs, apart 
 from their metrical and linguistic peculiarities, 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? 
 
 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, 
 20
 
 Political Songs 
 
 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 distress' d. 
 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 Suffra- 
 gette 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 : 
 
 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, 
 
 21
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 Tories may to wreck the work unite, 
 Britain's sons for Britain's freedom still shall fight; 
 None shall hinder 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 be 
 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 foemen flee! 
 Home Rule is just 
 And come it must 
 To set old Ireland free! 
 
 22
 
 Political Songs 
 
 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 ques- 
 tions at issue. This is the mark of the caucus. 
 
 It is a very difficult thing to write a good propo- 
 gandist song at all. A first-rate tune will often 
 cover up the most prosaic words, but generally speak- 
 ing 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 
 nationalization of the means of production, distribu- 
 tion, or exchange." One should avoid the kind of 
 concrete details that produce a sense of anti-climax, 
 
 23
 
 Books in General 
 
 and the kind of personalities that sound 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. Ra- 
 bindranath Tagore is generally approved. 
 I do not entirely agree with those who think 
 that Mr. Tagore's poems are masterpieces in Eng- 
 lish; for I find his English poetical prose monoton- 
 ous and without rhythmical 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 un- 
 precedented for centuries past. 
 
 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 So- 
 ciety) 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 enter- 
 taining stories." It then plunges straight in medias 
 res with a first canto, " On the birth of Prince Al- 
 
 25
 
 Books in General 
 
 bert, his education and arrival at mature years ; and 
 his wish to marry Victoria." 
 
 " There is a country of the world called Germany, 
 the eminence of which is known everywhere. In 
 its interior is a large district called the Dukedom 
 of Gotha, about thirty-seven miles in area, and con- 
 taining about one hundred and fifty thousand in- 
 habitants. The air of this district is pleasant, dry, 
 and cool ; and the water refreshing and pure. The 
 land is good and very fertile, and every article of 
 food and clothing is cheap there. In its neighbour- 
 hood is the city of Coburg, where the richest bless- 
 ings 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 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 
 26
 
 An Oriental on Albert the Good 
 
 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 acknowl- 
 edging 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 hon- 
 ourable that thou should be united in love to a child 
 of Germany." Various letters 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 admonished his son as to his future be- 
 haviour; and the party sailed for the port of London, 
 where " Victoria immediately went upon the ter- 
 race." The lovers met and sang, and the Prince re- 
 turned home to complete his studies. " A little time 
 after this occurrence the Queen again remembered 
 Albert; she caused a letter, official, and according to 
 rule, to be written to his father." 
 
 27
 
 Books in General 
 
 " Albert's father prepared himself at once, taking 
 necessary provisions, furniture, and money. Hav- 
 ing sat in a boat Prince Albert went forward accom- 
 panied 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 alli- 
 gator, 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 leap- 
 ing 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 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 hun- 
 dreds of children, yet did she never bear." 
 
 " Albert thought the waves were like an infuri- 
 ated elephant," but he arrived safely, and the mar- 
 riage 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 
 28
 
 An Oriental on Albert the Good 
 
 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 coquet- 
 ting in the garden of Paradise." 
 
 A great banquet followed, and when " the reign 
 of wine " was finished the music began. " Trom- 
 bones sounded so impressively that letters were im- 
 printed upon the face of the air." Then came the 
 dancing. " What shall I say of 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 tne Queen and the Prince revisited his native 
 
 29
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 dif- 
 ferent 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 hurt- 
 ful 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 woman; and 
 the more these jewels and ornaments are, the more 
 heart-charming and beautiful she looks." 
 
 This last aphorism is disputable.
 
 Epigrams 
 
 ANY one who reads Mr. R. N. Lennard's 
 charming little anthology of English epi- 
 grams 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 espe- 
 cially offensive to say about any one and especially 
 about politicians, 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 writ- 
 ing 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 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
 
 Books in General 
 
 a form so small is incapable of infinite variety and 
 grows exhausted. Johnson wrote a ludicrous bur- 
 lesque epigram 
 
 // the man who turnips cries 
 Cry not when his father dies, 
 'Tis 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 epi- 
 gram 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 cus- 
 tom of composing epigrams for private albums is 
 virtually extinct. Every schoolgirl writes in every 
 other schoolgirl's album that there is nothing Origi- 
 nal 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. 
 
 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 
 
 32
 
 Epigrams 
 
 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 Cole- 
 ridge'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. Len- 
 nard 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 nine- 
 teenth-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. 
 
 What cause for judgments so malign? 
 A brief reflection solves the mystery 
 
 33
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 falsification 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 de- 
 lightful as that written for his own tomb by the 
 obscene French poet Piron: 
 
 Ci-git Piron 
 
 Qui ne fut rien, 
 Pas meme 
 
 Academicien. 
 
 Lander's " I strove with none, for none was worth 
 my strife," however, could not be surpassed by any 
 serious epitaph. From Landor Mr. Lennard has 
 naturally had to draw freely for his more serious 
 34
 
 Epigrams 
 
 sections. Landor came nearer than any English 
 writers to rivalling the feats of the best Greek epi- 
 grammatists. 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 five score, 
 But ninety-nine more. 
 All, all except Hermann 
 And Hermann's a German. 
 
 The omission is the stranger in that Lander's greatly 
 inferior epigram on Germans is included. About 
 the longest poem admitted is Clough's revised ver- 
 sion 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; ancl 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 miscellan- 
 eous modern ones that float about. There are 
 Limericks and some Limericks will satisfy the 
 narrowest definition of an epigram which would 
 
 35
 
 Books in General 
 
 be worth preserving; and then there are odd frag- 
 ments like the effort alleged to have been written 
 on the blackboard by a Cheltenham schoolgirl: 
 
 Miss Buss and Miss Beale 
 Cupid's darts do not feel. 
 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 priv- 
 ately, though they would have been printed in a 
 franker day, must mostly remain unprinted in an 
 age when direct satire is considered ungentlemanly, 
 and the law of libel is so easily invoked. I remem- 
 ber Mr. 's epigram on Lady and Mr. 
 
 's on Sir . Mr. Lennard cannot be 
 
 expected to publish these.
 
 An Eminent Baconian 
 
 AVERT 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 afflu- 
 ent old ex-M.P., who, after a lifetime spent in busi- 
 ness, platform speaking, and the study of modern 
 mechanical improvements, suddenly plunged into the 
 fight with unprecedented enthusiasm and methods of 
 argument never equalled in their singularity. Set- 
 ting 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 Durning-Lawrence every common bush was 
 afire with Bacon. His outlook being of this char- 
 acter, it is scarcely to be wondered at that his meth- 
 
 37
 
 Books in General 
 
 ods of reasoning and of research were most sur- 
 prising. 
 
 Most people who read his pamphlet, The Shakes- 
 peare 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, according to Sir Edwin, must have 
 been at least as preoccupied with ensuring his identi- 
 fication 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 for- 
 eign engravings. For there was a secret brother- 
 hood 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 6? 
 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. 
 
 38
 
 An Eminent Baconian 
 
 I myself obtained in a strange way an amusing 
 insight into his looseness of procedure. He had 
 been writing letters maintaining his thesis in a con- 
 temporary 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 
 " Shakescene " and "the semblance of a hogg") 
 made it perfectly clear that Shakespeare was merely 
 Bacon's dummy. Any man with the slighest quali- 
 fications 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 com- 
 munication) to say that the fact that Mr. Ker's im- 
 portant and convincing reference had been ignored 
 by the Shakespeareans showed their utter incom- 
 petence. 
 
 But the most striking thing about him was his 
 detestation of Shakespeare. There are people who 
 hate Napoleon; there are people who object to Tor- 
 quemada; 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 
 
 39
 
 Books in General 
 
 mild and amiable Sir Edwin despised and loathed 
 Shakespeare. No epithets were, he felt, too op- 
 probrious for this rascal, who for three 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 Green- 
 wood is hors concours because, though an anti- 
 Shakespearean, he has doubts about Bacon; and we 
 have heard nothing lately about that romantic Amer- 
 ican 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 
 40
 
 An Eminent Baconian 
 
 of Shakespeare's authorship so irrefutable that no 
 one could dream of challenging them. For the ex- 
 amination of a mystery if you can persuade your- 
 self that there 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 un- 
 intentional 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. 
 
 With thee, Dark Demon what can charm? 
 
 Nor manners polish' d chaste, or rude; 
 42
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 Nor Friendship's hand nor Safety's arm 
 So vile art thou INGRATITUDE I 
 
 Tho' dear a Female's face, or form; 
 
 Tho' elegant her attitude; 
 We fly, as from the winged storm 
 
 // 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 re- 
 spects, but in the production of unintentionally amus- 
 ing 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 
 put those poets who are specifically cranky; in the 
 other those (some silly, some quite sensible people 
 
 43
 
 Books in General 
 
 apart from their artistic proclivities) who (Macau- 
 lay'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 aberra- 
 tions 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 num- 
 ber 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 Australia. This gentle- 
 man is addicted to prefaces proving that Mr. Glad- 
 stone, " 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 worth 
 while buying his Sonnets, Lays and Lyrics. The 
 poems themselves are not so amusing, though we 
 sometimes came across such ambiguous phrases as: 
 44
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 And when upon your dainty breast I lay 
 
 My weaned head more soft than eiderdown. 
 
 But the illustrations wood-blocks from eminent 
 artists like Albert Diirer 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 better- 
 ment 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 extraordi- 
 narily 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 discussions with her about politics. The 
 author's choice of a metrical form leads him to pages 
 and pages of this sort of thing: 
 
 / ceased f and somewhat eagerly she asked: 
 " Then you would justify the Socialist, 
 
 45
 
 Books in General 
 
 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; 
 
 Bw/ understand it yes! / 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: 
 46
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 I'm old John Bull of England, 
 
 My triumphs are in song. 
 I've fought and won great victories 
 
 Which did not take me long. 
 
 I've fought in many a battle 
 
 By sea as well as land. 
 I've fought in Russia, Belgium, 
 
 Africa and India's golden strand, 
 
 which occurs in a work appealing for better treat- 
 ment for British Honduras. 
 
 But most of the best bad verse is not propagandist. 
 Amongst the classics of the kind the Works of 
 Johnston-Smith rank high. These have been pub- 
 lished 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 conclusion. 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. 
 
 47
 
 Books in General 
 
 On speedy wing the graceful sea-fowl follow fast 
 They seem to me the souls of seamen drowned, 
 
 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 verv 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. 
 Yo-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 end- 
 48
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 ing 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. 
 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 re- 
 cently published: 
 
 What o' the wind? 
 It hisses through a vessel's spars. 
 
 What o' the wind? 
 It is in truth to mercy blind, 
 It surely from all rest debars, 
 And even frights the sturdy " tars." 
 
 What o' the wind? 
 
 An equal bathos is sometimes produced by inappro- 
 priate 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. 
 
 49
 
 Books in General 
 
 But the author of a recent drama of the Near East 
 came pretty near it with 
 
 . . . the diamond shaft of the fierce searchlight 
 From the lens of the crystal moon. 
 
 The chase after the unusual almost always means 
 disaster. This is another recent example: 
 
 / have found thee, dear! 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 junction above, in a fairer clime. 
 
 I have found thee 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 grand- 
 father's legacy accruing to him facilitated the publi- 
 cation 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, 
 50
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 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 cer- 
 tainly is a marked difference. 
 
 Most of the poets quoted above have, at any 
 rate, the gift of moving with some freedom within 
 their metres. But some people who publish 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 extraordi- 
 narily revolutionary conception 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 works 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. 
 
 51
 
 Books in General 
 
 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, 
 
 When, suddenly, his watchful eye, 
 At but four paces distance, saw 
 
 A worm, that back, as suddenly, 
 
 To his subterranean hole did draw. 
 
 Nathless the crane did, straight, begin 
 His beak, and claw, alike, to ply 
 
 And hoping the retreat be, 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 
 
 52
 
 The Beauties of Badness 
 
 May the reward to those that's due 
 Who, openly, have acted, reap. 
 
 This fable is called by the author A Surreptitious 
 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 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 novel of Mrs. Amanda 
 M'Kittrick Ros knows how much sustenance the 
 human spirit may derive from the byways of litera- 
 ture; 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 imploring to be collected. 
 
 53
 
 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 meaning- 
 less verse is so common as not to be worth preserv- 
 ing. 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 " blan- 
 ket." 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, 
 
 Your air preserves people's lives 
 And you have so little rain. 
 
 54
 
 More Badness 
 
 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, aford 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; 
 The fragrance of the blushing rose, 
 
 Its tints and splendid hue, 
 Will, with the seasons, decompose, 
 
 And pass as flitting 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; 
 
 55
 
 Books in General 
 
 A thousand objects bright and fair 
 
 May for a moment shine, 
 Yet 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 re- 
 ceived some time ago from a clerical 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 
 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. 
 Jiow terrible methinks his fate. 
 May no such torment fall on me. 
 
 The most ingenious writer who contributes the " Ob- 
 servator " column to the Observer offers me a couple 
 
 56
 
 More Badness 
 
 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. 
 
 57
 
 A Mystery Solved 
 
 APPARENTLY 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 frag- 
 ments 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: 
 
 58
 
 A Mystery Solved 
 
 Our King and Queen are never proud 
 They mingle with the densest crowd. 
 
 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! 
 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! 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. Al- 
 fred Noyes's various Coronation Odes. 
 
 59
 
 Carrying the Alliance too far 
 
 WHY is it that Japanese authors are allowed 
 to write in English newspapers any sort 
 of barbarous jargon they like? Mr. 
 Yoshio Markino was the first to be licensed. To 
 start with, one found his " delightfully quaint " Eng- 
 lish 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 
 considered in Japan at least so his friends tell 
 us the first poet of the day. Those who remem- 
 bered 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 prepared 
 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 writ- 
 ten 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. 
 60
 
 Carrying the Alliance too far 
 
 He writes English a great deal better than I do 
 Japanese. But why on earth cannot the newspapers 
 who print his works translate them into normal Eng- 
 lish? 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-Mark- 
 inesque 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 pro- 
 ductions were not unmercifully damned. What 
 should we say if newspapers began printing in all 
 their native crudity articles by Frenchmen and Ger- 
 mans 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 West- 
 minster to present its readers with a political article 
 opening: 
 
 61
 
 Books in General 
 
 " No Dutcher has the by Mr. Gamaliel Zoop, 
 Amerikansh postaltelegrafkommunikationdepart- 
 ment minister on politishekonomy famose lecture 
 to a at Manchester people-coming-together 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 discourte- 
 ous 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 unconnected? 
 
 62
 
 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 ex- 
 plain 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. There is simply nothing to look at. 
 If you put your head out of the window at Osna- 
 briick, 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 alleviation 
 on such occasions. The other occupant of my car- 
 riage had points about her. She was a young, cheer- 
 ful, 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 
 
 63
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 phleg- 
 matic. At frequent intervals his mistress lifted the 
 green curtain, looked him in the eyes with a bewitch- 
 ing 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 polite- 
 ness leaving gallantry out of the question com- 
 pelled me to reply always, " Yes, a beautiful little 
 bird." About twice an hour she retired to the din- 
 ing-car and came back exuding smiles and sighs 
 " I half 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 mat- 
 ter. 
 
 In intervals of silence I finished Mrs. Russell Bar- 
 rington's Life of Walter Bagehot (Longmans, 12s. 
 6d. net). It is a strange thing and unfortunate, 
 since so much material has disappeared with the pas- 
 sage of time that Bagehot should have had to 
 wait nearly forty years for a biography. 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 
 64
 
 May 1914 
 
 importance is attributed to irrelevant details. The 
 long description 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 giv- 
 ing 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 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 entertain- 
 ing 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. Personally 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. 
 
 65
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 Biographical Studies 
 jostling shoulders with works on money, may very 
 pardonably have assumed that these Studies, how- 
 ever 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 
 temperament, naturally emotional and mystical, was 
 most valuably reinforced by the balance, the toler- 
 ance, 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 Reviewers, are bound be- 
 fore long to be recognized as among the great clas- 
 sics of English criticism. Naturally he was not im- 
 peccable; 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 Words- 
 worth 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 
 66
 
 May 1914 
 
 influential on the character and the heart, yet hardly 
 capable of stringent statement, 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 commonly 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 relig- 
 ion of Nature, or more exactly, 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 expression. 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 unspoken; 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 
 
 67
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 sublim- 
 ity 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 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 Bage- 
 hot are illustrated in his own phrase : " If you would 
 vanquish Earth, you must invent Heaven." Bage- 
 hot, 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. 
 
 68
 
 May 1914: The Leipzig 
 Exhibition 
 
 ANY one who imagines that the English can, 
 or at all events do, compete with the Ger- 
 mans in beauty of book-production had bet- 
 ter go to Leipzig this summer and visit the Buchge- 
 werbe 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 tq 
 be capable of thorough inspection. Leaving out of 
 account the huge buildings devoted to the 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 ex- 
 hibition grounds are very extensive; they contain 
 (need I say?) a " Street of Nations," many foun- 
 tains, and countless cafes. There is a reproduction 
 of Heidelberg Castle, full of drinking-cups and the 
 
 69
 
 Books in General 
 
 weapons with which German students put a little 
 interest into each other's faces. There is a Bavar- 
 ian 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 waterchute 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 informed 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 English section in the 
 Halle der Kultur is certainly as good as any, and 
 the etchings shown by Mr. Muirhead Bone, Mr, 
 70
 
 May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition 
 
 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 Shakespeare 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 com- 
 pletely 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. Everything 
 our officials could have done has been done to per- 
 fection; and the special exhibits have been very well 
 chosen. Where we fall sadly short is in the ordi- 
 nary 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 them- 
 selves could have brought together a more at- 
 tractive-looking lot of books than they have done. 
 Most of them I mention no names seem to 
 have bundled together their books without any con- 
 
 71
 
 Books in General 
 
 sideration either of the contents or of the appear- 
 ance 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 speci- 
 mens 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 al- 
 most completely abandoned. I don't suggest that all 
 German books are more presentable than English 
 ones. Scientific works, 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 
 publishing 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 presentable, 
 our own publishers have no idea. There is, of 
 course, a much larger educated reading public in 
 72
 
 May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition 
 
 Germany than in England. In every bookshop you 
 are confronted by volumes of Dehmel, Hofmanns- 
 thal, and other writers who, were they Englishmen, 
 would never reach large circles of readers in their 
 lifetimes. Anthologies 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 ad- 
 mitted: that there is a larger literary public and 
 more interest in contemporary art, literary and pic- 
 torial. But, even granting all that, the German pub- 
 lishers in meeting the market have shown a taste, 
 and above all an enterprise (sometimes reaching 
 audacity, no doubt) , which most of our own publish- 
 ers have never revealed in the slightest degree. 
 
 To give a full account of the show is beyond my 
 ability, desire, and space. But in looking at the 
 latest products of commercial colour-printing in the 
 French pavilion I was struck by the extraordinary 
 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 lacunas all over the place. 
 
 73
 
 Books in General 
 
 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. 
 
 74
 
 The Mantle of Sir Edwin 
 
 I HAVE just spent three days reading Mr. E. G. 
 Harman's Edmund Spenser and the Imperson- 
 ations of Francis Bacon, published 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 to me comes into neither cate- 
 gory. It is very large and crowded with most com- 
 plicated detail; it is, though quite competently writ- 
 ten, devoid of literary grace; and it supports a mon- 
 strous thesis with arguments many of which are of 
 staggering absurdity. Yet in point of deadly fasci- 
 nation 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 discov- 
 ery with mild ruthlessness ; and not the most uncom- 
 promising of Wospolus was ever more sternly re- 
 solved to embrace logical conclusions. His chief 
 fault is that his premises are usually arbitrary or 
 quite insufficient; but the objective charm of his mas- 
 sive 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. 
 
 75
 
 Books in General 
 
 He assumes that. He assumes also that 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 acknowledgement of 
 authorship would have damaged his prospects of po- 
 litical promotion. This much granted, Mr. Har- 
 man 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 Burning- 
 Lawrence, with his " Hie, Hasc, 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 references to Ba- 
 con's political disappointments may be found, (3) 
 that documentary evidence supporting accepted au- 
 thorships 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 seri- 
 ous writers expressing their inmost selves could put 
 on styles like trousers. If somebody has borne wit- 
 ness 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; and his biographers have 
 76
 
 The Mantle of Sir Edwin 
 
 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 pos- 
 sessed by Spenser, who lived in Ireland and was (ac- 
 cording 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-beg- 
 ging; but what shall we say of the assumption that 
 if Spenser had written the poem the rivers of Ire- 
 land would have been described as fully as the rivers 
 of England? Why should the emigrant Civil serv- 
 ant 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 author- 
 ship 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 granted, internal 
 corroboration must be sought for. Anything is 
 
 77
 
 Books in General 
 
 good enough for this purpose. Mr. Harman even 
 finds evidence in the occurrence in several " Bacon- 
 ian " works of the phrase " golden wyres " as ap- 
 plied 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 no 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 Authorized Ver- 
 sion 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 pub- 
 lished before he was out of his twenties) ; the works 
 of Shakespeare ; practically the whole body of Eliza- 
 bethan poetical criticism (including Webbe's Dis- 
 course of Poesie, Puttenham's Art of Poesie, Sid- 
 ney's Apologie, Daniel's A Defence of Ryme, and 
 Meres's Palladis Tamia) ; many of the poems of 
 Gascoigne (written by Bacon before he was twelve) ; 
 certain works imputed to Nashe, Greene, and Ga- 
 briel Harvey; the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh and 
 the Last Fight of the "Revenge"; the works of 
 
 78
 
 The Mantle of Sir Edwin 
 
 Essex; Sidney's Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella 
 (with this key Bacon unlocked 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 Common- 
 wealth and Leicester's Ghost; and other minor 
 scraps. If this be all correct, we shall have to re- 
 vise 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 sup- 
 posed 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 feel- 
 ings. He was undoubtedly most unhappy at his ex- 
 clusion 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 com- 
 plaints were published over another man's name, 
 
 79
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 won- 
 der 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. 
 
 80
 
 "The Cattle of the Boyne" 
 
 I HAVE referred before to the frequency of mis- 
 prints 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 throughout 
 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: 
 
 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're the bhoy that's got inured to foam, 
 So come, bring in the koine. 
 
 Och, are they fish, flesh, fowl or good red herrings? 
 Perhaps they are red herrings, 
 
 81
 
 Books in General 
 
 Forlorn and wildered herrings, 
 
 Strayed from their native broine, 
 This hapless party which has lost its bearings 
 Fornint the sands of fioyne. 
 
 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, I'd 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. 
 
 82
 
 August 1914 
 
 AND it is less than three months since I was 
 writing complacently about the Leipzig 
 book exhibition! I wrote about the ex- 
 quisite 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 Shake- 
 speare 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 dis- 
 persed. The officials in charge of the various build- 
 ings have fled to their respective domiciles. The 
 cheerful male members of the Bavarian Peasants' 
 Band have taken off their green hats and put on hel- 
 mets, left the women behind, and gone off to burn 
 
 83
 
 Books in General 
 
 villages like their own, and disembowel sunburnt 
 French peasants as naturally amiable as themselves. 
 Memories so 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 mun- 
 dus." The remark was made by a Swedish states- 
 man 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 century 
 there has been no great change, and that the human 
 race is as horribly ridiculous an institution 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 some- 
 body's neutrality has and has not been violated, and 
 
 I have left all this as I wrote it. S. E. 
 84
 
 August 1914 
 
 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 unquestionable 
 facts contained therein, as distinguished from the 
 doubtful reports and the office-written padding, you 
 find it could all be got into a paragraph. We have 
 frequently heard that the day of the war corre- 
 spondent was over. We heard it during the Russo- 
 Japanese War of which we certainly got very lit- 
 tle news and we heard it during the Balkan cam- 
 paign. But at the moment of 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 falsi, 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 ad- 
 vices from Teheran report a conflict at Toul; and we 
 hear that the Mercure de Bruxelles states " on excel- 
 lent 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, 
 
 85
 
 Books in General 
 
 even turned up at the very start. This mythical 
 gentleman is at least as old as the Franco-German 
 War of 1870, and his last appearance was in the 
 Balkans. No sooner does a war start than one of 
 the combatants hastens to describe his diabolical ac- 
 tivities 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 ru- 
 mours, but they might give the clearest indication, 
 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 exper- 
 ience 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 ves- 
 sels 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 dis- 
 aster." 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 
 86
 
 August 1914 
 
 our newspapers they bear very little relation to the 
 events (if any) which have originally generated 
 them. War correspondents in Europe to-day seem 
 to be able to do little more than sit in friendly for- 
 eign capitals and send home little bits of news out 
 of the local papers. And if we want a really accu- 
 rate 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, describ- 
 ing the attack on Port Arthur, and those vivid Rus- 
 sian 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 im- 
 possible 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 firmament, though Wilhelm II 
 In sinning armour waits his Waterloo, 
 Though on all sides the blood rains down in torrents 
 Love's interests still are in safe hands with Florence. 
 
 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. 
 
 88
 
 Mrs. Barclay sees it through 
 
 Has Robert ^Bridges' 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 Newbolt's 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? 
 
 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 inspira- 
 tion 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 fascina- 
 tion 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. 
 
 89
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 con- 
 fession 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 Vic- 
 toria Memorial! 
 
 " Mysterious through the gloom, he saw the na- 
 tion's fine memorial to a deathless memory. The 
 gush of green waters, the golden figure at the sum- 
 mit, 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 
 90
 
 Mrs. Barclay sees it through 
 
 deserted him under a misapprehension and was re- 
 solved 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 con- 
 stantly 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, you 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.' . . . 
 
 " 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. Ultimately 
 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
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 ap- 
 pointment. 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 u gracious grace- 
 fulness " 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 
 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 window brimming over with love and remi- 
 niscences; 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 
 92
 
 Mrs. Barclay sees it through 
 
 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. 
 
 Forwdrts reports that Dr. Ludwig Frank, a mem- 
 ber 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 Reichstag last May. He 
 took me into the Strangers' Gallery of the House, 
 where I heard Dr. Liebknecht makes one of his anti- 
 armament speeches, the one in which he incidentally 
 accused a Prussian general of negotiating sales of 
 decorations. It seems very remote now. Dr. 
 Frank was barrister; a big Jew with a heavy, hand- 
 some face sallow skin, aquiline nose, black mous- 
 tache, strong chin, dominating eyes. His romantic 
 air he was supposed to resemble 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. 
 
 93
 
 A Topic of Standing Interest 
 
 THE Oxford University Press has just is- 
 sued a beautiful little edition of Erasmus's 
 Praise of Folly, with a good reproduction 
 of Quentin Matsys' portrait of Erasmus as a front- 
 ispiece. The last edition of the Encomium Mor'us 
 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. Eras- 
 mus's humour was an improvement on mediaeval hu- 
 mour, which, except in a few cases, cannot make a 
 modern man laugh save sometimes through the 
 brazenness of its indecency. Erasmus was a child 
 of the Renaissance, a wit, a scholar, a questioner of 
 all things, a man of the world, a revolutionary con- 
 formist. But there are long dull passages in his 
 most famous book, and many remarks that seemed 
 most daring to 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 
 
 94
 
 A Topic of Standing Interest 
 
 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 pleas- 
 antly 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 moth- 
 ers are wont to retire for undiscovered 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 fore- 
 seeing 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 nobody ever yet 
 could see them," and he is especially down on the 
 scholastic theologians. Sterne, it will be remem- 
 bered, described a dispute " as to whether Gpd could 
 make a nose as big as the steeple of Strasburg." 
 This is scarcely a caricature of the kind of discussion 
 ridiculed by Erasmus : 
 
 95
 
 Books in General 
 
 ' 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 appeared 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 transubstantiated into the same 
 body that remained on the tree?" 
 
 Word-spinning he detested, and he refers the 
 Nominalists, the Realists, the Thomists, the Albert- 
 ists, 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 pre- 
 served immaculate from original sin." 
 
 " 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 hesi- 
 tated to put friars in the most ignominious positions 
 96
 
 A Topic of Standing Interest 
 
 (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 devastat- 
 ingly employed since Lucian. He showed, like Rab- 
 elais, 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 hypocrites may 
 be the worst the cant of crticism is the most tor- 
 menting." " 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 if they had con- 
 quered 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 succession, though 
 
 97
 
 Books in General 
 
 his works cannot now compete for readableness with 
 those of Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, and Vol- 
 taire. Satirists have usually been considerable 
 plagiarists, and The Praise of Folly has an impor- 
 tant 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 re- 
 printed chunks of his work almost literally without 
 any acknowledgement whatever. 
 
 The new Oxford edition gives a modernized re- 
 print of the Caroline Version by John Wilson. In 
 the introduction Mrs. P. S. Allen gives some interest- 
 ing bibliographical particulars. Over forty editions 
 of the Encomium Monte were published in the au- 
 thor's lifetime; within forty 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, Pol- 
 ish, and Modern Greek. 
 
 98
 
 Was Cromwell an Alligator? 
 
 SOME people who at least avoid the error 
 of ascribing the invention to Steele or Addi- 
 son say that Abraham Cowley was the Fa- 
 ther 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 painstaking 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 
 the complementary advantage of always supplying 
 information when one looks for it. 
 
 The edition is especially to be welcomed as there 
 are many persons capable of appreciating Cowley 
 
 99
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 Concern- 
 ing 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 Cow- 
 ley disports himself. The italics are mine: 
 
 " From which he was rebuked by the universal 
 outcry of the Divines, and even of the Citizens 
 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 
 100
 
 Was Cromwell an Alligator 
 
 for a synagogue, if their purses and devotions 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 grati- 
 tude, 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 Mosquito [Mosque]. Such was his 
 extraordinary Piety to God, that he desired he might 
 be worshipped in all manners, excepting only that 
 heathenish way of the Common Prayer Book." 
 
 But this strong language is not the strong language 
 of a man whose breast is a burning fiery furnace; it 
 is the invective of a man who is amused by his op- 
 ponents 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 char- 
 acter-sketch of the man whom they doubtless re- 
 ferred to in public as " our great leader." 
 
 But if such qualities are defects when a man is 
 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 Pre- 
 faces are as good are most delightful, and they 
 have as personal a turn as Lamb's. They all, vir- 
 
 IQI
 
 Books in General 
 
 tually, have one text: the Sabine Farm text; the re- 
 tired Urbs in Rure text. They speak of the coun- 
 try's charms in the ex-townsman'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, sol- 
 itary meditation, and a Kempis's " little book in a 
 corner." Their learning is lightly worn; their lan- 
 guage 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 perhaps too tender, for I meet 
 a thousand Madmen abroad, without any perturba- 
 tion; though, to weigh the matter justly, the total 
 loss of Reason is less deplorable than the total dep- 
 ravation of it. 
 102
 
 Was Cromwell an Alligator 
 
 " 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 inhabitants 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 consider with myself, which way I 
 might recommend no less to Posterity the Happiness 
 and Innocence of the Men of Chertsea; but to con- 
 fess the truth, I perceived quickly, by infallible dem- 
 onstrations, 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 Toupin- 
 amhaltians 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 cer- 
 tain 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 
 poetry and of his childhood's memories is more 
 full of feeling than is usual with him. The other 
 is one of the most picturesque pieces of light mor- 
 alizing in the language, full of what we all call the 
 Playful Irony of the Gentle Elia, as in sentences 
 
 103
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 pres- 
 sures of extream Poverty"; and it describes the 
 pleasures of littleness most alluringly. But some- 
 how, in spite of his assertions, one never quite be- 
 lieves in the genuineness of his middle-aged prefer- 
 ence 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 charm- 
 ing 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, how- 
 ever, 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. 
 
 104
 
 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 con- 
 stantly 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 pet- 
 tinesses, 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 mandkind 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 his qualities 
 
 105
 
 Books in General 
 
 at their best, but it shows his defects at their worst. 
 The principal contents are The Little Man and 
 Studies in Extravagance. The first is a short play 
 showing how a German, an American full of altruis- 
 tic platitudes, and two self-contained and " proper " 
 English people shrink in the most selfish and cow- 
 ardly way from a forlorn baby suspected (falsely, of 
 course, for the sake of the extra irony) of typhus. 
 The " studies " are examinations 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. Galsworthy 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. Gals- 
 worthy'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 contemp- 
 tible. Many great men have been gloomy or pessi- 
 mistic. Mr. Hardy is not exactly a merry grig, 
 Schopenhauer was consistenly 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 com- 
 monplace is not possible if we hold the view 
 106
 
 The Depressed Philanthropist 
 
 that things may be done that may not be dis- 
 cussed, 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. Gals- 
 worthy 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 mel- 
 ancholy with a certain gusto, or (b) if, being a pro- 
 fessed realist, he appears to have taken cognizance 
 of every aspect that has presented 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 classify 
 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 be- 
 cause 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 cari- 
 cature in greys, and a caricature which is not amus- 
 ing. Even in his very well-made plays the char- 
 
 107
 
 Books in General 
 
 acters are not, to my mind, usually interesting in 
 themselves. One does not believe in them as per- 
 sons. They are just a set of types, as stagy and 
 unreal as the old stage figures of melodrama, 
 though they are called charwomen, clerks, magis- 
 trates, and company directors instead of being called 
 Irishmen, 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 uninterest- 
 ing, 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 im- 
 portant 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 things, especially 
 108
 
 The Depressed Philanthropist 
 
 balls whether they reposed on little inverted tubs 
 of sand or moved swiftly towards him, he almost al- 
 ways hit them, and told people how he did it after- 
 wards. 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 state- 
 ment 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. Galsworthy'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 
 unjust view. At heart a humanitarian, he has got 
 
 109
 
 Books in General 
 
 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. 
 
 no
 
 A Polyphloisboisterous Critic 
 
 I REMEMBER that is to say, I wish I re- 
 membered, 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 ses- 
 quipedalian height, who let out the blood of an ich- 
 thyosaurus with a polyphloisboisterous 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 pro- 
 duced, 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. The work, indeed 
 (to use the phrase Mr. Henderson himself applies 
 to a play of Strindberg's) , was " colossal in its in- 
 commensurability." It was the kind of book one 
 had thought could only be produced by a large com- 
 mittee of Chinese scholars; and although it did not 
 lead one to respect the author's powers of judging 
 the relative importance of his various facts, it at 
 
 in
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 jour- 
 nals 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. Hen- 
 derson could have talked to the editors of all these 
 papers and beaten all of them hollow in knowledge 
 of the modern literature of their respective countries. 
 The actual subjects of his papers are familiar 
 enough: Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck, Gran- 
 ville Barker, and Wilde. But in discussing them he 
 shows an amazing acquaintance with everybody 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 
 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 polysyllabic and ro- 
 tund of speech. 
 
 He begins well with Strindberg, of whose first 
 112
 
 A Polyphloisboisterous Critic 
 
 married years he observes that they " were undoubt- 
 edly 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 trav- 
 elled. Ibsen and Strindberg were " so antipodal in 
 temperament, yet so cognate in the faculties of in- 
 tuitive perception and searching introspectiveness." 
 One of Strindberg's works blurs the vision of the 
 average spectator, " with its kinetoscopic hetero- 
 geneity of spiritual films " : Peer Gynt (on the other 
 hand, shall I say?) stood for " the disciplinary bank- 
 ruptcy of laxity." " Concretizes " and " inscena- 
 tion " are the kind of words he rejoices in, but per- 
 haps two or three longer extracts will better illus- 
 trate the quality of his style : 
 
 " To peep into the workshop of the great master's 
 brain and assist at the precise balancing of the argu- 
 ments pro and con, to observe how an idea first finds 
 lodgment in the brain, and to note the gradual sym- 
 metrical accretion of the fundamental nuclei for the 
 final creation this is a privilege that has perhaps 
 [sic~\ never fully been realized by an observer. 
 
 " America is young and hopeful, at least; it is not 
 peopled, we are confidently assured, with soul-sick 
 tragedians mouthing their futile protests against the
 
 Books in General 
 
 iron vice of environment, the ineradicable scar of 
 heredity, the fell clutch of circumstance. 
 
 4 Yet the reiterant ejaculations, the hyper-ethereal 
 imaginings of the symbolist manner, are the symp- 
 toms 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 state- 
 ments 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 paragraph 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 u the father of modern otology," and to be 
 told that Maeterlinck'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 fact that precisely the same " cry " has been, 
 on page 37, attributed to Strindberg. Personally I 
 plump for Maeterlinck. 
 
 114
 
 "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 stud- 
 ents and candidates for the doctor's degree. These 
 persons, when they are not exhuming dead reputa- 
 tions from well-deserved sepulchres, show an un- 
 canny ingenuity in inventing original classifications 
 and instituting unnecessary comparisons. But now 
 and again such students manage to produce some en- 
 lightening piece of " research " work, and The 
 French Revolution and the English Novel (Put- 
 nams) 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, The 
 French Revolution and the English Poets." That
 
 Books in General 
 
 is the first sentence of the preface, and it has a strictly 
 academic flavour about it. The book is a " scien- 
 tific " treatise; it would not have been written, so to 
 say, either by a French Revolutionary or by an Eng- 
 lish 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 sup- 
 ply 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 re- 
 ligion 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 God- 
 win and Mary Wollstonecraft are occasionally writ- 
 ten; and quite recently Thomas Holcroft, one of the 
 chief of our Revolutionary novelists, was given con- 
 siderable notice in Mr. Brailsford's excellent little 
 book in the Home University Library. But, as far 
 as my experience 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 so- 
 ciety with the gunpowder in the jam. 
 
 Miss Gregory's book is very comprehensive. 
 Her principal figures are Holcroft, Godwin, and 
 116
 
 "Another Century, and then . . ." 
 
 Robert Bage; and she gives synopses of all their 
 novels, with extracts illustrating their doctrines. 
 Holcroft, one of the most lovable figures in the his- 
 tory 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, Bun- 
 yan, 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 ar- 
 rested 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 ac- 
 quitted, 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. Holcroft's courage 
 never weakened " when Wordsworth, 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 under- 
 taken to write a novel I have proposed to myself a 
 specific moral purpose." His best novels are Hugh 
 Trevor and Anna St. Ives- In the latter the hero, 
 
 117
 
 Books in General 
 
 Frank Henley, who shocks the orthodox by taking 
 service rather than self-interest as his guiding prin- 
 ciple, remarks: 
 
 u Let men look around and deny if they can that 
 the present wretched system of each providing 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 Will- 
 iams 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 phi- 
 losopher'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 ad- 
 vance of their time that they still hold good in ref- 
 erence to certain of the States of America. God- 
 win 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 market and, 
 118
 
 "Another Century, and then . . ." 
 
 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 Indi- 
 ans, and quails at the change criticizes institutions 
 with something of the tone of the versatile Mr. Smi- 
 lash in An Unsocial Socialist. 
 
 Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Iruyne are only in- 
 teresting, if interesting at all, because they were writ- 
 ten 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 al- 
 luring 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. Ridi- 
 cule of visionaries and demagogues through the me- 
 
 119
 
 Books in General 
 
 dium of novels was a recognized sport then as now; 
 and Lucas instituted an elaborate comparison be- 
 tween political and religious revivalists. 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. 
 
 1 20
 
 Her rick 
 
 MR. F. W. MOORMAN has edited for the 
 Oxford Press a new edition of Herrick, 
 which should supersede all its predeces- 
 sors. There is very little editorial matter; Mr. 
 Moorman has already written a Life, and his intro- 
 duction 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 ap- 
 pears 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. 
 
 Any one who regards Herrick as an unsophisti- 
 cated warbler pouring forth profuse strains of un- 
 premeditated art may study these variants and cor- 
 rect 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 antho- 
 logies, etc., including those published after the Hes- 
 perides, are all earlier than the versions in the Hes- 
 perides. Now and then one is sorry that this should 
 be so, as when the presumably earlier 
 
 121
 
 Books in General 
 
 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. Some- 
 times alterations in almost every line of a poem may 
 be studied; sometimes there is a whole series of at- 
 tempts 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 delib- 
 erate sense of all the complex mechanism of verse. 
 This rubicund Royalist rector was above all else a 
 craftsman and a connoisseur. 
 
 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 commemorated. His adora- 
 tions 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 rela- 
 122
 
 Herrick 
 
 tive superiority 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 " liquefaction " of Julia's 
 silks is characteristic of him. " O how that glitter- 
 ing taketh me ! " he might have said of a thousand 
 other things. He looked at colours and felt sur- 
 faces 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, 
 cherryblossoms, 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 com- 
 pare his lady's cheek to either indifferently or to both 
 in a sentence; he relishes 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 physi- 
 cal world. But it is usually their sensuous appeal 
 that is registered, sometimes their sentimental ap- 
 peal, 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 
 
 123
 
 Books in General 
 
 agreeable objects as daffodils and maidens. His 
 sheer virtuosity made him compose 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 Lungs, 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 
 complained, 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. 
 
 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 parsimon- 
 ious) who preserved his nails, warts, and corns in 
 boxes to make jelly for his broth. It is not aston- 
 ishing that when the " sprightly Spartanesse " ap- 
 peared to him in dream she remarked: 
 124
 
 Herrick 
 
 Hence, 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 pro- 
 duced a perfect cameo. 
 
 His outlook and methods being such, it is not sur- 
 prising that when he gave up his " unbaptized 
 Rhimes " and took to " Noble Numbers " he was 
 comparatively unsuccessful. Quaintness and neat- 
 ness do not go far in religious verse, and the con- 
 genital materialism of Herrick's imagery sometimes 
 produced the most grotesque effects. 
 
 God is all forepart, for we never see 
 Any part backward in the Deitie. 
 
 An epigram which might have had some point if 
 
 I2 5
 
 Books in General 
 
 applied to a man is merely vapid when applied to 
 the Deity. And the vapid becomes comic in 
 
 / crawle, I creep; my Christ I come 
 To thee, for curing Balsamum, 
 
 and 
 
 Lord, I confesse, that thou alone are able 
 To purifie this my Augean stable; 
 Be the Seas water, and the Land all Sope, 
 Yet 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. 
 
 126
 
 The Muse in Liquor 
 
 IN former times men wrote about drinking with- 
 out the slightest self-consciousness. Our fore- 
 fathers, from Teos to Chertsey, from Green- 
 land's icy mountains to India's coral strand, sang the 
 praises of what nobody in those days dreamt of call- 
 ing alcohol, as they sang the praises of the other 
 amenities of life. To Homer u 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 sen- 
 suality, they still had no idea that there was any- 
 thing morally questionable about drink. So on- 
 wards 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 debili- 
 tated frame was about the worst thing you could do. 
 Drinking in the Middle Ages was unchallengeably 
 
 127
 
 Books in General 
 
 respectable. " The introduction of wine and viticul- 
 ture," says Mr. A. L. 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 maintains 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 perfect song in which he expresses 
 the hope that he shall meet his latter end in a hos- 
 telry 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 
 128
 
 The Muse in Liquor 
 
 Henry III wanted to, he gave his old wine to the 
 poor the gift was not so noble 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-swallow- 
 ing capacity of himself and Tib, his wife, was on 
 the safe side, for his sovereign lady, Queen Eliza- 
 beth, 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 corresponding 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-Vivant's 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 
 
 129
 
 Books in General 
 
 book and a suitable companion to its shelf-neighbour, 
 The Maltworm's Vade-mecum, a guide to the public- 
 houses of early Georgian London. But if Mr. 
 Thomas had been a contemporary 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 con- 
 tinue to indulge in such things, or whether it would 
 be wiser to abstain from all enjoyments of that char- 
 acter, 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 fermented drinks as an in- 
 vention of the Devil. The results of this are seen 
 in the twentieth-century Bacchanal's writings. He is 
 130
 
 The Muse in Liquor 
 
 on the defensive. He cannot write a mere song in 
 praise of drink: his Muse is largely, even mainly, 
 concerned with dispraise of the opponents of drink. 
 Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, belauding drinks as 
 against beverages, strike an attitude which Anacreon 
 simply would not have understood. 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. Chester- 
 ton's volume Wine, Water, and Song. Mr. Ches- 
 terton spends half his time in abusing abstemious 
 American and English millionaires, tea, cocoa, min- 
 eral waters, and grocers who, lacking the genial 
 proclivities of publicans, have never been known 
 
 To crack a bottle of fish 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 vol- 
 ume of collected Poems recently issued are
 
 Books in General 
 
 amongst the finest bibulous songs ever written, 
 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 
 
 fish 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, 
 " I don't 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, ac- 
 cording to his ability, singing it? 
 
 132
 
 5 Misspent 
 
 ANY one who is interested in what nobody 
 has yet asked us to call the British language 
 must have felt apprehensive if he read the 
 correspondence recently printed in the Times on the 
 subject of a synonym 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 of- 
 fered a prize of 5 for the best synonym and " mem- 
 bers 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, Do- 
 minion, Britannian, Britoner, Greater Briton, Ang- 
 lian Pan-Briton, and such repulsive composts as Em- 
 pirean, 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, 
 Dominislier, Fraternanglian, Nonsunsetton, and 
 Heptathalassian were among them. And so, pos- 
 sibly, was Oversear. 
 
 133
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 ex- 
 pression. 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 omni- 
 bus. 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 philosopher 
 or scientist constructs one out of fragments 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 Colonials. But I doubt 
 
 Airman happily seems (July 1918) to have won. S. E. 
 134
 
 5 Misspent 
 
 whether such a word will result from a public com- 
 petition. 
 
 When it conies 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 hypersensi- 
 tive people think that the word used to have a faintly 
 derogatory flavour. u 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 " Co- 
 lonial " 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 lirst used by us they had certain associations. 
 For it is evident that to the vast majority of our 
 
 135
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 acquaint- 
 ance 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 sympa- 
 thetic if I said I was using the words in a Shake- 
 spearean (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 ob- 
 ject changes its form its name changes its connota- 
 tion. 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 
 subordinate 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." 
 
 136
 
 Shakespeare's Women and 
 Mr. George Moore 
 
 HANDLING the Porcupine of Avon is al- 
 ways 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 ob- 
 servation in a lecture in French (published in the 
 Revue Bleue in 1910) which is an important docu- 
 ment in the movement against what Mr. Shaw calls 
 Bardolatry. 
 
 " He is inconceivably wise ; the others conceiv- 
 ably." Thus Emerson; and a few generations of 
 such sweeping remarks were bound to be followed 
 by a reaction. For a hundred years we have swal- 
 lowed Shakespeare steadily and swallowed him 
 whole ; a man has even written a book on The Mes- 
 siahship of Shakespeare. And of all his powers, 
 
 137
 
 Books in General 
 
 that of creating an infinite variety of female char- 
 acter has been perhaps more enthusiastically praised 
 than any other. The professors have given us 
 treatises on Shakespeare'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 Ger- 
 man writers on the subject, kneels and adores, and 
 asks women to do the same. " This piece," he says 
 of Henry Fill, 
 
 " 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 hom- 
 age been paid to the sex than by Shakespeare in his 
 presentation 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 com- 
 pound of talent, feeling, wisdom, beauty, and gentle- 
 ness " ? As for Lady Macbeth, with her " Gothic 
 grandeur, rich chiaroscuro, and deep-toned colours," 
 even she is not to be insulted by comparison with 
 138
 
 Shakespeare's Women and Mr. G. Moore 
 
 other villainesses. Sophocles' Clytemnestra had 
 been mentioned, but 
 
 " would any one compare this shameless adulteress, 
 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 prob- 
 ably 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 wor- 
 shippers: 
 
 " 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 real woman. 
 The Renaissance was interested in women only as 
 
 139
 
 Books in General 
 
 queens or odalisques, and Shakespeare 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 " Falstaff is the most universal and 
 original thing in Shakespeare." " Hamlet is the 
 hieroglyphic and symbol of the intellect; Falstaff 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 Falstaff; 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 dog- 
 matize 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 un- 
 derstand, either, any one editing a whole play for 
 love of Antonio, Bassanio, Benedict, the Duke of 
 Twelfth Night, King Lear, Othello, Mark Antony, 
 or Henry V? It is possible to hold the view that 
 140
 
 Shakespeare's Women and Mr. G. Moore 
 
 Shakespeare " put himself " into a few characters 
 and observed the others " from the outside," mak- 
 ing them most interesting when they are most mark- 
 edly what are called " character parts." Person- 
 ally, though I should certainly know Hamlet or 
 Falstaff if I met them in swallowtails, 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 Mac- 
 beth 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 admission 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 char- 
 acters 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. 
 
 141
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 ex- 
 hausting 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, Des- 
 demona a sort of submissive odalisque, Beatrice a 
 chatterbox, and Ophelia a goose." 
 
 It is very difficult indeed to say anything new about 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 142
 
 Moving a Library 
 
 I DO not remember that any of our meditative 
 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, 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 creep- 
 ing 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 igno- 
 minious 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, un- 
 trammelled, illiterate Superman? Civilization!
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 brief- 
 est and least harassing of the operations called for. 
 Dusting (or " buffeting 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 cere- 
 mony until everything else has been settled. 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 differ- 
 ent in shape and arrangement. It is quite impos- 
 sible to preserve the old plan; but the devisal of 
 another one brings sweat to the brow. If one hap- 
 pened to be a person who never desired to refer 
 to his books the obvious thing to do would be to 
 144
 
 Moving a Library 
 
 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 classifica- 
 tion by subject to the compulsory classification by 
 size ; and, in my case, there is an added difficulty pro- 
 duced by a strong hankering for some sort of chron- 
 ological 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 intruding 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 re- 
 duced 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." 
 
 145
 
 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 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 illuminating 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 conversa- 
 tion with a faithful pen. Butler Boswellized him- 
 self. 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- 
 146
 
 Table-Talk and Jest Books 
 
 tween general table-talk and anecdotes told of cer- 
 tain 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 con- 
 versation, and some Latin wrote a book, now un- 
 fortunately lost, under the piquant title of De Joels 
 Ciceronis. The great age of such collections began, 
 however, with the Renaissance, when Poggio the 
 Florentine collected his " facetiae." My own ex- 
 tracts from Poggio are included in a German col- 
 lection 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 be- 
 ing incarcerated 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 re- 
 corded 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; Thuana, Perroniana, etc. The Sor- 
 beriana " 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 Ob- 
 servations Curieuses de M. Menage," of which the
 
 Books in General 
 
 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, now- 
 adays, very little read. The contents of both of 
 these books are arranged (as is Butler's) under sub- 
 ject-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, 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 sometimes 
 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 criti- 
 cism, 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 stones about fifty different men. When 
 148
 
 Table-Talk and Jest Books 
 
 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 in their refer- 
 ences. Our eighteenth-century ancestors were ad- 
 dicted 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 Boswell's 
 Johnson is the finest of Johnson's. 
 
 149
 
 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 sitting out at 
 a country dance. Coloured lamps burned between 
 boughs, trees gently swished under a summer sky, 
 the sound of violins and the glide of many feet pene- 
 trated 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 panegyrics, 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 him- 
 self were brought in : and almost the most modest of 
 150
 
 Stephen Phillips 
 
 the assessors was Mr. William Archer, who de- 
 scribed 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 Francesca; 
 the subsequent plays were received with a dimin- 
 uendo of warmth; and in the last few years he was 
 comparatively ignored. 
 
 The early adoration was absurd but not incompre- 
 hensible. 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 revolu- 
 tionary innovator 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 previously experienced, 
 he seemed, therefore, to be a consummate artist. 
 He gave them precisely what they had learnt to de- 
 sire and expect from a poet, the familiar splendours
 
 Books in General 
 
 and the familiar silences, the familiar agonies and 
 the familiar tendernesses, the scents, the flowers, the 
 gems, the old words with their unmistakable associ- 
 ations, 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 cer- 
 tainly in every way superior to most of the other 
 attempts which have been made in our time at stage- 
 plays in blank verse. It was effective in the theatre. 
 One remembers the excitement about the skilful end- 
 ing: 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 
 brainwork 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 
 152
 
 Stephen Phillips 
 
 full of redundant metaphor and violent outbursts of 
 picturesque but too flimsy rhetoric. There was lit- 
 tle characterization in them, the persons were pup- 
 pets 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 quali- 
 ties that gave people a thrill they were unaccustomed 
 to in the theatre of his time, are quintessentialized in 
 Herod's megalomaniac speeches and in the oratori- 
 cal Marlowesque 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 cer- 
 tainly 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 
 
 153
 
 Books in General 
 
 naked to the eye. His last volume, Panama and 
 other Poems, was issued just before he died by his 
 original publisher, 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 biography 
 are illustrated by his obituary notices. 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' Col- 
 lege, Cambridge, when he joined Mr. Benson's com- 
 pany; 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. 
 
 154
 
 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 achievements. 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 en- 
 courages the hope of greater finds. But why not 
 make just as much of a palaver about Dr. Paget 
 Toynbee's disinterment of nearly a hundred " new " 
 letters by the poet Gray? The new letters are in- 
 cluded 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 dedi- 
 cated. 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 
 
 155
 
 Books in General 
 
 the poet's death in 1771. In all there are 248 let- 
 ters; 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 un- 
 intelligent acceptance. How easily the most comic 
 errors may creep into a text where each editor ne- 
 glects 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 subsequent editors 
 into " Sudantem fuge "/ 
 
 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 hyperself-conscious, nastily ar- 
 tificial. 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 
 156
 
 Gray and Horace Walpole 
 
 no apparent defect save excessive seriousness. 
 There is a touch of the priggish mixed with the high- 
 mindedness and generosity of this able young in- 
 valid; but one can understand Gray's devotion to 
 him. Some of the poetry of his here given (he ap- 
 peared in Dodsley's Miscellany by the way) is sur- 
 prisingly good. He was the Arthur Hallam of the 
 eighteenth century. 
 
 The Walpole letters are, as always, unsurpassable 
 of their kind. His undergraduate letter (in parody 
 of Addison's descriptions of Italy) relating a jour- 
 ney from London to Cambridge, 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 the correspondence with Gray as to 
 the details and publication of his works, the half- 
 solemn, half whimsical concentration on the tiny 
 antiquarian 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 con- 
 test Walpole's position as the greatest of Eng- 
 lish letter-writers, there is a flavour about his 
 letters that makes them peculiarly delightful. Wal- 
 pole writes fully dressed, though with exquisite 
 manner; Gray writes naturally, and without ob- 
 vious reserve sometimes even gambolling. There 
 
 157
 
 Books in General 
 
 may be people, familiar with Gray only through 
 his elevated and sombre verse, who fancy him 
 an exceedingly self-contained 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 cer- 
 tainly contemporaries of his who met him and got 
 the impression that he was constitutionally grave, 
 reticent, aloof. His letters show that he was any- 
 thing 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," addressing the 
 illiterate screed " to mie Nuss att London " ; in an- 
 other he wallows in Oriental imagery about the 
 dew of the morning; in another he applies to stag- 
 nant Cambridge a whole long passage from Isaiah 
 describing deserted 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 1 " 
 
 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, 
 158
 
 Gray and Horace Walpole 
 
 and makes short Aprons and furbelow'd petticoats 
 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 Spin- 
 ner'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 publisher's alarm, with- 
 drawn 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 weight of 
 poetry or prose: so, since my return hither, I put 
 up about two ounces of stuff: viz. The Fatal Sis- 
 ters, 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 French- 
 man) were uniformly good. He suspected Ossian, 
 but hoped he was a fraud for the sake of the jest. 
 
 159
 
 Books in General 
 
 If, he said, Macpherson had done it all to hoax 
 fools, " I would undertake a journey into the High- 
 lands 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 main- 
 tained, 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, something 
 one may tell, that looks as if it were near at 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 perpetual 
 demand? 
 
 1 60
 
 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 some- 
 thing in this. An educated bookseller can actually 
 educate other people. Many intelligent young per- 
 sons 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. Book- 
 sellers may act as teachers. There are booksellers, 
 though not many, who make a practice of " nursing " 
 promising young customers, 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 
 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 
 
 161
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 learn- 
 ing prevented one from buying anything cheap from 
 him; I have now encountered one whose interest 
 in his subject prevented one from buying anything 
 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 absorbing something 
 that looked as if it might be the Travels of Living- 
 stone or Speke. His spectacles were on his fore- 
 head, 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, betraying his origin. " And what may you be 
 interested in?" "Oh ... books," I replied 
 vaguely. " That is a verra conseederable cate- 
 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 
 162
 
 A Horrible Bookseller 
 
 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 mathematics, and they 
 gave him a sizarship at Cambridge. 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 extraordi- 
 nary 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, never- 
 theless, 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? 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 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 
 
 163
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 be- 
 ing hypocrisy, mendacity, corruption, 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 proceeded. 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 re- 
 sponse to his attentions. How that old man earns 
 his living I don't know. I think he must have priv- 
 ate means. But in future I shall have a warmer 
 feeling than ever for the sort of red-nosed second- 
 hand bookseller, now, unfortunately, not very com- 
 164
 
 A Horrible Bookseller 
 
 mon, 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. Stilling- 
 fleet'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 Be- 
 tween Eunomius, a Conformist, and Catharinus, a 
 Nonconformist, I struck a very pathetic thing. The 
 work was written, I believe, by the Catholic contro- 
 versialist Godden, and published in 1677. At that 
 time it was difficult for Catholics to get anything out 
 in England, and this work was published at Paris. 
 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 ne- 
 cessity arising from thence of making use of a Paris 
 166
 
 The Troubles of a Catholic 
 
 Printer, who understands not a word of English, the 
 Reader will have no cause to wonder, if he some- 
 times meet with ant for and, bu for but, te for the, 
 is for it, tit for tis, wish for with, etc., and often- 
 times with false Pointings, words unduly joined, and 
 syllables un-artificially divided at the end of lines, 
 as Ro-me, appropria-te, 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 else- 
 where; and the situation thus candidly explained 
 must have been a common one. A collection of 
 English books printed abroad, which would be in- 
 teresting 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. 
 
 167
 
 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 Crucifixion. 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 set- 
 tlement; 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 Bibli- 
 cal 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 stories 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. At- 
 tempts at covering the same ground as the Bible, at 
 amplifying an already fine thing, are almost pre- 
 168
 
 The Bible as Raw Material 
 
 destined to failure. One can understand the temp- 
 tation. 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 ignomin- 
 iously) , 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 inconspicuous- 
 ness 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 Trevel- 
 yan's poem, The Foolishness of Solomon (a title 
 that, for some vague reason, I always resent) , be- 
 longed 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 con- 
 
 169
 
 Books in General 
 
 cerned, for some of it was borrowed from a Ger- 
 man) of the incidents, 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 
 170
 
 The Bible as Raw Material 
 
 and Swinburne. His poem, however, cannot really 
 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 con- 
 ferred that title upon such a poem I don't know, un- 
 less 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 scor- 
 pions 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. 
 
 171
 
 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 con- 
 tains 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 Ho- 
 mer'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 di- 
 verting chapter is that on what he calls " Jargon," 
 which he distinguishes from Journalese. The dis- 
 tinction he draws may be appreciated if I concoct 
 examples of both commodities. Writing in " Jar- 
 gon " 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, instruc- 
 tive, and educative character." 
 172
 
 How to avoid Bad English 
 
 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 tat- 
 ters with -the shrapnel of his ridicule. He will not 
 sheathe the sword until . . ." 
 
 Yes. . . . The first kind consists of woolly, indefi- 
 nite words, of redundancies and shapeless prolixi- 
 ties; the man who writes the second is trying to pro- 
 duce what he believes to be " literature " by means 
 of imagery and rhythmical movement. Sir Arthur 
 says that the greatest propagators of Jargon are 
 public bodies, politicians, and so on; but he recog- 
 nizes that journalists 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 differ- 
 ence 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
 
 Books in General 
 
 tabulates. One must aim at accuracy (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 writers,
 
 How to avoid Bad English 
 
 find their proof-sheets free from trite and super- 
 fluous words which they would be ashamed to pub- 
 lish. 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 inde- 
 pendently 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. Chester- 
 ton has very probably said that it is red. I merely 
 use " green grass " as an example of the sort of 
 thing that an exaggerated fastidiousness might lead 
 a man to question in his own work. 
 
 175
 
 Books in General 
 
 There remains one property of good prose that 
 no amount of painstaking or instruction can produce. 
 That is rhythm. It is, indeed, remarkable 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 sug- 
 gestion more might be useful for him. That is, 
 that he will be well advised in making his uneuphon- 
 ious sentences short if he desires his writing to be an 
 efficient instrument of persuasion.
 
 Woodland Creatures 
 
 "np|ARNASSUS in Piccadilly," is the headline I 
 1 -^ see in my paper. Follows an account of a 
 A " seance " promoted by Miss Elizabeth As- 
 quith 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. Out- 
 side the house a large concourse watched the poets 
 arrive. There were Mr. Yeats, Sir O. Seaman, Mr. 
 Hewlett, 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 
 
 177
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 semicircle, 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 pre- 
 occupied with the control of their own faces, which, 
 on such an occasion, must have " strained at the 
 leash of dignified deportment." 
 
 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 fit- 
 ness of things " is being violated. We are accus- 
 tomed, of course, to the other kind of recitation, the 
 reading by an interpreter who is not a creator, and 
 who is not exposing his heart in public: the prize 
 child and the local elocutionist who declaims Tenny- 
 son'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 
 178
 
 Woodland Creatures 
 
 smote his bloomin' lyre " in public; he had nowhere 
 else to smite it, for he (presumably) 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 perform- 
 ers to face the ordeal. 
 
 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 run- 
 ning 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 
 
 179
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 admis- 
 sion 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 himself, 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 eavesdrop- 
 ping or opening a stranger's letters. And every- 
 body is conscious of the national titter in the back- 
 ground. When the authors of Prize Poems at the 
 Universities give the official reading of their verses, 
 their friends invariably assemble to grin in the gal- 
 leries. Undergraduates have still some natural- 
 ness. 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 
 180
 
 Woodland Creatures 
 
 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 
 recitation 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 re- 
 lease 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 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 declaiming 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 
 
 181
 
 Books in General 
 
 be certain that the speaker unless he is a very 
 " advanced " poet indeed understands the work 
 which he is repeating. With other performers one 
 always has to take one's chance. From the profes- 
 sional reciter God save us all. 
 
 182
 
 Other People's Books 
 
 LIKE 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 CEcolampadius on St. John's Gospel, which I 
 bought merely because they looked pleasant and 
 which nobody on earth could be expected to read. 
 I mean books in English and of comparatively re- 
 cent 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 cogita- 
 tive being, I ought not leave so notable a stone un- 
 turned. The feeling passed and never came back. 
 And there is Ranke's History of the Popes up to 
 the present undisturbed 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 
 
 183
 
 Books in General 
 
 house one may fly to it, and, under the same condi- 
 tions, 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 sum- 
 mer 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 I And how remarkably he 
 has gone on improving, especially as a metrist. But 
 more than ever, after a heavy dose of these com- 
 pressed 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 con- 
 sumptive 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 her- 
 self to a Universe in which the telling of such lies is 
 a moral obligation. There is another small drama 
 in which a woman, maltreated by her husband, dies, 
 telling her old lover that she wishes she had married 
 184
 
 Other People's Books 
 
 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 remar- 
 ries 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, re- 
 membering the death-bed remark and suddenly see- 
 ing 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 after carefully, and he 
 spends his time wondering whether he was justified 
 in telling, etc. Probably these stones, 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 com- 
 
 185
 
 Books in General 
 
 pleting. 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 aston- 
 ishingly finished, accurate, and restrained. It is ab- 
 surdly unlike a first book. Its weakness, as it ap- 
 pears to me, lies in the dullness of the principal char- 
 acter. 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 fasci- 
 nating, 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. 
 
 186
 
 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 masterpieces, 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 modelled on Candide. 
 They are burlesques of oneself and one's friends, 
 and every other discussing, theorizing person and his 
 friends. 'Charlatans of all kinds, literary, political, 
 eccelesiastical, 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 
 revolutionary conspirator to the professional sceptic; 
 he gets them all in, quintessentializes their doctrines 
 into exquisitely flowing prose, and knocks their heads 
 together with charming ruthlessness. Any extract 
 will illustrate the flow of 'his dialogue : 
 
 187
 
 Books in General 
 
 4 The anatomy of the human stomach,' said Mr. 
 Escot, ' and the formation of the teeth, clearly place 
 man in the class of fungivorous animals.' 
 
 1 Many anatomists,' said Mr. Foster, * are of 
 a different opinion, and agree in discerning the char- 
 acteristics of the carnivorous classes.' 
 
 " ' I am no anatomist,' said Mr. Jenkinson, ' and 
 cannot decide where doctors disagree; in the mean- 
 time, I conclude that man is omnivorous, and on that 
 conclusion I act.' 
 
 " ' Your conclusion is truly orthodox,' said the 
 Reverend Doctor Caster; 'indeed, the loaves and 
 fishes are typical of a mixed diet, and the practice 
 of the Church in all ages shows ' 
 
 " * That it never loses sight of the loaves and 
 fishes,' said Mr. Escot." 
 
 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. 
 
 188
 
 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 vol- 
 umes entitled William Wordsworth, 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, criti- 
 cism. The information may perhaps be a little too 
 ample for the weaker brethren. The map (show- 
 ing 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 sup- 
 plied with the winter and summer timetables of the 
 Grammar School at Hawkshead which he attended 
 and at which (as Professor Harper rather senten- 
 tiously observes) an education different in kind, but 
 perhaps not inferior in quality, to that supplied by 
 Eton was bestowed upon him. New light is thrown 
 on certain incidents in his career; his " circle " is 
 
 189
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 Words- 
 worth'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 attrac- 
 tiveness. 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 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 
 190
 
 Wordsworth's Personal Dullness 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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 tran- 
 quillity. 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 
 benevolent, 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 this Wordsworth! 
 His genuine philanthropy was unquestionable. His 
 portrait might, one thought, be that of a pioneer of 
 
 191
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 typi- 
 fied. 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 re- 
 sponse. 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 Words- 
 worth and of his relations with Revolutionary 
 France. But, as Wordsworth's French friends 
 would have said (provided they were not ashamed 
 of using such a worn-out tag) plus c,a change plus 
 c'est la meme chose. The early Wordsworth may 
 have been a different being; but Professor Harper 
 192
 
 Wordsworth's Personal Dullness 
 
 certainly does not prove that he was. From birth 
 to death in this biography he appears as the same 
 high-minded, staid, sober, solemn monument. He 
 joined in the Revolution not so much a " kid-glove 
 revolutionary " 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 portraits 
 and his biographies always leave this sort of impres- 
 sion: 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 unsur- 
 passed grandeur speaking the deepest of one's un- 
 expressed thoughts, appealing to and drawing out 
 all the divinest powers in man's nature. Of his 
 greatness surely no rational 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 explana- 
 tion; but the accompanying general absence of any 
 luxurious appeal to the senses is. He speaks direct 
 to the labouring intellect and the sensitive heart; 
 and the enjoyment of him, if great, is usually enjoy- 
 ment of the austerer kind, like mountain-climbing. 
 There is nothing soft or enervating or luxurious 
 which can make reading him an aesthetic debauch. 
 
 193
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 writ- 
 ings (and his irritating classification of them), is the 
 reason of his comparative lack of popularity. 
 But . 
 
 194
 
 Henry James's Obscurity 
 
 HENRY JAMES'S last work was his essay 
 on Rupert Brooke, written as an introduc- 
 tion 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 un- 
 finished 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, al- 
 most 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 com- 
 parative newspaper obscurity; in the last three or 
 four years he suddenly and silently, like a star ap- 
 pearing from behind a cloud, took his unchallenged 
 
 195
 
 Books in General 
 
 place in the firmament as one of the established 
 great. But he was not widely read. Daisy Miller, 
 ever so many years ago, had a fairly general suc- 
 cess; 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 fur- 
 ther limited by the legend of his style. I remember 
 reading an old novel written in the days when Rob- 
 ert Browning was an Incomprehensible studied by a 
 Cult. The heroine of it gave herself away rather 
 by remarking, " 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 
 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 wandering 
 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 
 196
 
 Henry James's Obscurity 
 
 difficult. But it was a unique kind of obscurity. 
 There is an obscurity produced when a man, eagerly 
 tumbling 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 awk- 
 wardness of the cow handling a rifle. James's ob- 
 scurity 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 ex- 
 ample, that last sentence of mine and, endeavouring 
 to give it a more exact shape, have made of it some- 
 thing like the following: 
 
 11 He wanted, when, that is, he experienced any- 
 thing so definite or, shall we put it, so positively 
 energetic, as a want, to make no statement, none at 
 any rate which might be taken by even the least per- 
 ceptive of his hearers as a delivered, and, as it were, 
 final testimony of his reaction to things as he saw 
 
 197
 
 Books in General 
 
 them, which did not precisely embody what he 
 wanted (when, once more, he coherently desired 
 anything, as we have it, " higher " than the elemen- 
 tary 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 anything 
 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. 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 ex- 
 quisite and inexhaustible. 
 198
 
 Henry James's Obscurity 
 
 Few modern writers have exercised so strong 
 an influence over those who have surrendered them- 
 selves 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 deliberate) 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 
 whicIT 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 idiosyn- 
 crasies whom one 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 in- 
 comes (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 refusing to place 
 
 199
 
 Books in General 
 
 his pen habitually at the service of the Great Forces 
 of Our Time and other things whose capital impor- 
 tance is of custom indicated by capital letters. But 
 in an age of sloppy writing he stood for accuracy 
 of craftmanship; and even men whose subjects are 
 Invisible Exports of the Parthenogenesis of Plants 
 might learn from him how to use to more advantage 
 their intellects and their pens. 
 
 200
 
 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 presen- 
 tation copies, fetched extravagantly high prices. 
 But the outsider is generally puzzled at the extreme 
 variation in the prices, a variation which passing 
 fashions in taste do not explain. There is an expla- 
 nation, as one would-be purchaser was made some- 
 what 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 shill- 
 ings on it. The agent who was to bid arrived late, 
 and another bookseller bought the lot for five shill- 
 ings. So the would-be purchaser asked his book- 
 seller 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 col- 
 league 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. 
 
 201
 
 Books in General 
 
 " 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 auctioneers can, of course, do nothing to 
 stop the practice and it is as legal as it is dishon- 
 ourable. At times an outsider with a big banking 
 account 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 dis- 
 cussed. 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 col- 
 lectors are lazy people; it is not now fashionable 
 202
 
 The "Ring" in the Bookselling Trade 
 
 as it was in the Duke of Roxburghe's day for the 
 Old Nobility to crowd the salerooms, bidding des- 
 perately amid groans of anguish and cheers of tri- 
 umph. 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 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 differ- 
 ence between the sums paid here and the sums paid 
 at Sotheby's or Hodgson's will be pooled and di- 
 vided, 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 
 
 203
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 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 
 salerooms 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. 
 204
 
 The "Ring" in the Bookselling Trade 
 
 But, if I may digress, I must say that, for per- 
 sons 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 is is ex- 
 citing 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 Exhibition 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 impossible to get any- 
 thing 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 
 
 205
 
 Books in General 
 
 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. 
 
 206
 
 Music-Hall Songs 
 
 MR. WILLIAM ARCHER contributes to 
 the Fortnightly an attack on the music- 
 hall. He says that it is the home of vul- 
 garity 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 gen- 
 uine 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 extraordi- 
 nary 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 commercial products manufactured by 
 half-wits. 
 
 207
 
 Books in General 
 
 Mr. Archer's case being so sound, it is all the 
 more a pity that he overdoes it. It is true that 
 almost all these songs are vile rubbish, and that 
 the songs of the Villikins and his Dinah and Cham- 
 pagne 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 move- 
 ment 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 rhym- 
 ing," 
 
 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: cer- 
 tainly one gets from Mr. Archer's article the im- 
 pression that the critic is only acquainted with a 
 few of the most famous of music-halls 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 
 208
 
 Music-Hail Songs 
 
 words. For instance, there is Mr. Harry Lauder's 
 It's Nice to get up in the Morning. 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 five 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 experience. 
 It is folk-poetry even if the folk didn't write it. It 
 is not the folk-poetry of the seventeenth 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; 
 
 209
 
 Books in General 
 
 but even that high-spirited couplet shows their 
 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 // 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. 
 210
 
 Music-Hall Songs 
 
 Bigamy is one of the chief comic-song subjects. 
 Vermin in one's bed, drunkenness, and the food 
 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 any- 
 thing, and the serious ones are almost invariably im- 
 becile. 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 
 
 211
 
 Books in General 
 
 for them? Probably not; they think the words 
 don't matter. That they are mistaken (though the 
 tunes count 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, remov- 
 ing a wig, a glass eye, a wooden arm, two wooden 
 legs, etc. In the chorus the narrator suddenly de- 
 scribed her as " 'Arf a woman and 'arf a tree," and 
 this admirable if unrefined trope was the most suc- 
 cessful 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. 
 
 212
 
 More Music-Hail 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 mathe- 
 matical fact that the casting of this pebble from my 
 hand alters the centre of gravity of the Universe." 
 That was Carlyle's way of putting it. Somebody 
 wrote a book of theatrical reminiscences: the book 
 set Mr. William Archer pondering on the fatuity of 
 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! 
 
 213
 
 Books in General 
 
 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. 
 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: 
 
 / can't change her/ 
 TVo matter how I try, 
 214
 
 More Music-Hall Songs 
 
 But I'll chop her up for firewood 
 7n 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 ob- 
 served that it gets its effect by sticking close, as 
 Wordsworth advised, to the natural phraseology 
 and sequence of everyday speech. 
 
 Mr. Albert Chevalier, I admit, I did not mention, 
 He has not been primarily a music-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 'e are and What's 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 num- 
 bers 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 pre- 
 215
 
 Books in General 
 
 vails 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 en- 
 trepreneur, but all his wit was wasted. The chorus 
 of one song mentioned a well-known and much-ad- 
 vertised comestible: this wouldn't do, as all the 
 vendors of similar articles would be jealous and, pos- 
 sibly, refuse to advertise any more on the pro- 
 gramme. 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 better 
 than it should be. This reminds me that in tabu- 
 lating favourite music-hall subjects one should cer- 
 tainly have mentioned bad smells. Throughout his- 
 tory 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 some- 
 times tempted to think that most nations do not 
 notice them so much as we do. 
 216
 
 More Music-Hail Songs 
 
 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 dreadful. 
 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 Mom, 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 peren- 
 nial 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, 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. 
 
 217
 
 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 constructed 
 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 predecessors 
 put together. And if we stop constructing Utopias, 
 this will happen not because we have ceased to 
 218
 
 Utopias 
 
 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 dis- 
 tribution 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 influenced) 
 by the transient conditions of their own time. For 
 instance, the great variety of opinion which Utopians 
 
 219
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 communistic 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 bride- 
 grooms 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 men- 
 tions the possibility of concealing deformities as 
 though it were a common practice that should cer- 
 tainly be guarded against by law. When we get to 
 Bacon we find this odd idea copied, with the differ- 
 ence that it is now the friends of the respective 
 parties that make the examination. 
 
 The endless queer details in Utopias would in 
 themselves make such a study amusing. Plato's pas- 
 sion to secure that no mother should know her own 
 child; the preposterously exact account of the 
 amount of money subscribed towards the foundation 
 of the new state in Theodor Hertzka's Freeland; 
 the wonderful battle between the fleets of, if I re- 
 220
 
 Utopias 
 
 member 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 
 inscribed 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 in- 
 troduction with the bronzed and bearded seaman 
 who went out with the companions of Columbus and 
 was stranded on an unknown island is as charm- 
 ing 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 
 outskirts of Utopian literature, such as various gro- 
 tesque 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 believe, the only 
 book on record which purports to have been written 
 by a man who dies in the last chapter and describes 
 
 221
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 permanent 
 fdeals 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 distribution of wealth, crowded 
 and insanitary houses, child labour, wars of aggres- 
 sion, or sweating. There are large numbers of in- 
 
 222
 
 Utopias 
 
 dlistrlous and accurate people in this country and 
 America who are hunting for subjects about which 
 they can write volumes of u research." I wish one 
 of them would write the book I suggest. 
 
 223
 
 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 selection 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 be- 
 tween the character and private and public actions 
 of this monarch and the descriptions of him by lit- 
 erary 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 ex- 
 treme If applied to St. Francis of Assisi. But no 
 one, not even his father, received such wholehearted 
 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 
 224
 
 Charles II in English Verse 
 
 Centre of our Hopes and Happiness, Charles," and 
 began : " Illustrious Infant, Give me leave to ac- 
 knowledge myself thy servant, ere thou knowest thy- 
 self 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 be- 
 comes even more rhapsodical : 
 
 " 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. 
 
 Dryden's poem on Charles's return to England 
 is pitched a little lower. It certainly contains lines 
 like 
 
 The winds that never moderation knew, 
 Afraid to blow too much, too faintly blew; 
 
 22$
 
 Books in General 
 
 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, O 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 " 
 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 consolation 
 that a James has succeeded a Charles: 
 226
 
 Charles II in English Verse 
 
 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 untrue. 
 
 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 fill'd a throne. 
 
 He sketches Charles's career. He compares his 
 exile to the banishment of David (an open crib 
 from Astra Redux} and says of England that, 
 when he came back, 
 
 to his arms she fled 
 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 : 
 
 In Charles so good a man and King we see 
 A double image of the deity. 
 Oh! had he more resembled it! Oh, why 
 Was he not still more like, and could not die? 
 
 227
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 occupation 
 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 Fulsome 
 Poems in the English Language. It would be a 
 more entertaining book than most. Very few ex- 
 amples, 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 acces- 
 sion we have lost the habit. Any one who should 
 address his sovereign to-day in words like those ad- 
 dressed to Charles II by his subjects (e. g. Great 
 George, the planets tremble at thy nod) would be 
 suspected of pulling the sovereign's leg. 
 
 228
 
 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, cling- 
 ing to a solitary plank, it is unlikely that I shall have 
 spent the last hour on shipboard selecting mental 
 food for a highly problematical 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 un- 
 necessary bluntness, that he will not believe me if I 
 say that one of them would be the Bible. 
 
 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 companions of solitude, 
 
 229
 
 Books in General 
 
 the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Dictionary of Nat- 
 ional 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. Sup- 
 pose, 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 Encyclopedia. Having learnt 
 all about its anatomy, progenitiveness, and habitats, 
 one would then refer to the Oxford Dictionary for 
 the derivation of its name. Underneath the phil- 
 ological discourse would be quotations 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 al- 
 ready dealt with; once in a way perhaps, for senti- 
 ment'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 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. 
 230
 
 The Most Durable Books 
 
 One might fairly suggest, in such a connexion, that 
 a book is either ( i ) any single coherent work by 
 one author, or two in collaboration; or (2) any 
 series of works which either has been, or might rea- 
 sonably be expected to be, published in a single vol- 
 ume. The edition for island use would not, how- 
 ever, 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 discrimina- 
 tion between author and author, the poets, especially, 
 as a body, being at a great advantage over the novel- 
 ists; 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 pro- 
 posing to be marooned for a fortnight or three weeks 
 and then taken off the island by " willing hands " ; 
 but the books one wants for a residence of many 
 
 231
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 suspect that 
 the passages with pencil-marks beside them will sat- 
 isfy 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 refer- 
 ence 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 anything 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 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 
 232
 
 The Most Durable Books 
 
 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 bewil- 
 dered modern novels say La Curee, Le Paradis 
 des Dames, and L'Assommoir, or a judicious selec- 
 tion 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." 
 
 233
 
 The Worst Style in the 
 World 
 
 THE word " euphuism " is commonly em- 
 ployed: it is also commonly confused with 
 " euphemism." The thing is very prop- 
 erly 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 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 demons 
 have just published, through Routledge, a new edi- 
 tion, fully annotated. A generation unfamiliar with 
 it will have a chance of reassessing it. 
 
 The work is in two parts. Euphues: The 
 dnatomy of Wil 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 Bibliography 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 pub- 
 234
 
 The Worst Style in the World 
 
 lished 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, anti- 
 theses, and superfluous imagery without the content 
 of sense that Lyly always had. Some writers openly 
 ridiculed it. Shakespeare and Jonson made sport 
 with euphuistic 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. 
 
 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 Fs 
 reign the wicler public seems to have turned away 
 from it, and in 1632, E. Blount, the publisher, pref- 
 acing 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 " : 
 
 1 These Papers of his, lay like dead Lawrels in a 
 Churchyard; But I have gathered the scattered 
 
 235
 
 Books in General 
 
 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," Euphues never appeared again, save in 
 two brief eighteenth-century adaptations. For al- 
 most a hundred years his names was never men- 
 tioned; Lilly the astrologer was much better known. 
 Most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics dis- 
 missed him as a 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 
 tremendous 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 
 236
 
 The Worst Style in the World 
 
 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 to life. His narra- 
 tive does not come to much; most of his space is 
 occupied by harangues, debates, treatises, and let- 
 ters; 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 recurrent 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 
 
 237
 
 Books in General 
 
 soonest eaten with the Moathes, and the Cambricke 
 sooner stayned than the course Canvas: which ap- 
 peared 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, 
 loathing 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 fol- 
 lowed 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, run- 
 neth out of hand to the hearb Dicbanum, and is 
 healed." 
 238
 
 The Worst Style in the World 
 
 " 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 stricken 
 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 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 
 u 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. 
 
 239
 
 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 Re- 
 form. The Simplified Spelling Society, however, 
 has sent it a memorial urging that " the reform of 
 English spelling is eminently one that merits the 
 practical consideration of the Committee." The 
 signatories include 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 direc- 
 tive minds of the Lady's Realm and the Ardrossan 
 and Saltcoats Herald are in the movement; and the 
 only " men of letters " are Messrs. William Archer, 
 H. G. Wells, Eden Phillpotts, 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 memo- 
 240
 
 The Reconstruction of Orthography 
 
 rial makes the usual points about saving children's 
 time, facilitating the acquisition of foreign langu- 
 ages, lightening the work of teaching defective chil- 
 dren, 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 deci- 
 malizing our coinage and our weights and meas- 
 
 ures." 
 
 This comparison seems to me very misleading, 
 if by decimalization is meant the introduction of the 
 Continental metric system. For this latter is uni- 
 form in various countries, whereas the reform sug- 
 gested by the Simplified Spelling Society would do 
 nothing to approximate the sound-values of our let- 
 ters to those of letters in foreign tongues. Cosmo- 
 politan systems have been proposed, very complex 
 and full of odd new letters; but this Society's sugges- 
 tions, whilst eliminating some difficulties for the 
 foreigner, would leave English just as difficult for a 
 Frenchman 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 indi- 
 cate those sounds in the French way he would write 
 (I am not a phonetician) something like " E Foeust," 
 etc. So the Society had better not pitch its promises 
 too high. This, nevertheless, remains a minor point. 
 The chief considerations undoubtedly are the do- 
 mestic effects of this piece of Reconstruction. 
 
 241
 
 Books in General 
 
 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. " Educated " English at present has an 
 increasing Cockney element in it. The common 
 41 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 pronunciation, 
 why have we abandoned the old pronunciation of 
 words once phonetically spelt? Shakespeare pro- 
 nounced the initial 4< k " in " know " and " knee." 
 We have dropped it out. And we have no guaran- 
 tee that spelling these words according to our present 
 slack pronunciation would not be followed by an- 
 242
 
 The Reconstruction of Orthography 
 
 other 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 pronunciation 
 which the original spelling would have correctly rep- 
 resented! 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 exer- 
 cise 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 some- 
 where, crying "Lard! Lard!" Had he been a 
 spelling 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 returned. The same thing hap- 
 pened to words containing the diphthong " oi." 
 " Join " and " oil " were, in Middle English, pro- 
 nounced 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- 
 
 243
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 en- 
 thusiasts have continuously failed to bring about a 
 change. This is the oldest of the Campaigns. It 
 was already old when in 1585 a book was published 
 with this title-page (differently accented) : 
 
 " AEsopz Fable'z in true Orto'graphy with Gram- 
 mar-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 Committee 
 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. 
 
 244
 
 Mr. James Joyce 
 
 MR. JAMES JOYCE is a curious phenom- 
 enon. 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 reputa- 
 tion 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 afterwards his second book 
 Dublincrs 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 Young Man began to run serially in 
 the TLgoist. " The Egoist, Ltd.," has now pub- 
 lished this book, and nobody is surprised 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. Presum- 
 
 245
 
 Books in General 
 
 ably some characters and episodes are fictitious, or 
 the author would not even have bothered to employ 
 fictitious names. But one is left with the impres- 
 sion 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 strug- 
 gles are mainly inward: there is nothing unusual in 
 that. He has religious crises : heroes of fiction fre- 
 quently 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 fail- 
 ure, 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 . . ." 
 246
 
 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 sometimes 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 integ- 
 rity, his sharp eyes, and his ability to set down pre- 
 cisely 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 registering 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 phari- 
 saisnf) prevent us from importing into general con- 
 versation. Mr. Joyce can never resist a dunghill. 
 He is not, in fact, quite above the pleasure of being 
 shocking. Generally speaking, however, he carries 
 conviction. 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 pas- 
 sions are as powerful to him as physical passions; 
 and as far as his own bias goes it may as well be in 
 
 247
 
 Books in General 
 
 favour of Catholic asceticism as of sensual material- 
 ism. For his detachment as author is almost in- 
 human. If Stephen is himself, then he is a self who 
 is expellee! and impartially scrutinized, without pity 
 or " allowances," 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 judg- 
 ments, if he forms them, are concealed. He never 
 even shows by a quiver of the pen that anything dis- 
 tresses 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 remark- 
 able discussions at home about Barnell and Stephen's 
 education) is as close to the dialogue of life as any- 
 thing I have ever come across; though he does not 
 make the gramophonic 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 pe- 
 riods of classical prose and at the other disjointed 
 and almost futuristic sentences. The finest sus- 
 tained pages in the book contain the sermon in which 
 248
 
 Mr. James Joyce 
 
 a dear, simple old priest expounds the unimaginable 
 horrors of hell : the immeasurable solid stench as of 
 a " huge and rolling human fungus," the helpless- 
 ness 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 flam- 
 ing 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 involuntarily 
 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 
 
 249
 
 Books in General 
 
 it had better be neglected by 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 lit- 
 erature. What Mr. Joyce will do with his powers 
 in the future it is impossible to conjecture. I con- 
 ceive 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. 
 
 250
 
 Tennessee 
 
 LETTERS from strangers can usually be ac- 
 counted 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 fol- 
 lowing: 
 
 LINES 
 
 Written on receiving from the Librarian of a Col- 
 lege 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. 
 
 Mine ears have heard your distant moan, 
 
 O mountain youth of Tennessee; 
 Even the bowels of a stone 
 
 Would melt to your librarian's plea. 
 Although we're parted by the ocean, 
 
 I'm most distressed about your fire: 
 Only I haven't any notion 
 
 What sort of volume you require. 
 
 251
 
 Books in General 
 
 / 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 fill 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. 
 
 Longfellows may be in your line 
 
 (Littles we know are second-raters), 
 Or one might speed across the brine 
 
 A Mayflower full of Pilgrim Paters. 
 Or, then again, you may devote 
 
 Yourselves to less asthetic lore, 
 Yet if I send you out a Grote* 
 
 For all I know you'll ask for More. 
 
 O thus proceeds my vacillation: 
 
 For now the obvious thought returns 
 
 Or, with an appearance of greater generosity, one might return 
 them the Pound they sent us some years since. 
 252
 
 Tennessee 
 
 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.
 
 Sir William Watson and 
 Mr. Lloyd George 
 
 "^\ EPRESENTATIVES of literature and 
 r^ art " usually appear in the Honours Lists, 
 *- ^- and they are usually queer representatives. 
 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 dis- 
 tinguished 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 Will- 
 iam Blake, Sir Robert Browning, Sir W. Words- 
 worth, Sir S. Taylor Coleridge, Sir George Mere- 
 dith stood beside Sir Lewis Morris and Sir W. Rob- 
 ertson 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 knighthood may usefully 
 be given is the deserving person who has worked 
 conscientiously for years without adequate recogni- 
 tion and of whose existence the public might to 
 254
 
 Sir Wm. Watson and Mr. Lloyd George 
 
 his and its 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 sev- 
 eral good and many respectable poems. He is still 
 skilful, and can echo effectively the accents of Words- 
 worth 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, 
 
 255
 
 Books in General 
 
 Harass their sluggish and uneager blood, 
 
 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 
 Fie, 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 
 256
 
 Sir Wm. Watson and Mr. Lloyd George 
 
 his meed in a sonnet To the Right Hon. Sir Edward 
 Carson, on leaving Antrim, June 30, 1916, and an- 
 other sonnet acclaims Lord Northcliffe to whom, 
 possibly, there is a 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 Northcliffe's conviction that 
 nobody in his senses ever dreamed of using shrapnel 
 against wire. Had the shells passage been ex- 
 
 257
 
 Books in General 
 
 panded it might have been less cacophonous. As it 
 stands, it gives rise to the suspicious illusion that the 
 sibilant cry was uttered by Mr. (or is it Sir?) Wilkie 
 Bard. But no; it was " neither King nor Bard." 
 
 258
 
 Stranded 
 
 ""TW TO," I thought, " I won't take any books 
 ^Wj 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 Gar- 
 diner; good-jbye, 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 pos- 
 sibly 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 Li- 
 brary." It would be ungracious, I felt, to let such 
 versatility go unrecognized. Besides, one might as 
 well take a novel or two out with one in the boat. 
 It might make the intervals between the bites seem 
 a little shorter. So in I went. 
 
 A young girl with a pigtail escorted me past the 
 Quaker Oats and the Gold Flakes, under a little 
 
 259
 
 Books in General 
 
 low doorway and into a back room. " A shilling 
 deposit, and twopence on each book," 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. 
 
 1$. 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 Bar- 
 rier, 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. T 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 
 260
 
 Stranded 
 
 or escaped massacre on St. Bartholomew's Day. 
 He had a 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. Wiliam 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 distinguish really 
 imaginative literature, but I am not tempted. 
 
 It is not reasonable to expect a man at this date 
 to return to A Yellow Aster, or Moths by Ouida. 
 As for The Silence of Dean Maitland, the predica- 
 ment of that respected ecclesiastic with the undis- 
 closed 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 
 
 261
 
 Books in General 
 
 of the plot, except 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 grind- 
 ing poverty that," etc. How many years ago is it 
 since that immortal paragraph, reproduced in fac- 
 simile 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 cir- 
 culation 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 Merri- 
 man now. This is better. But will or will not a 
 reperusal of The Cultures and Roden's 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 
 262
 
 Stranded 
 
 these veterans, fascinated by so systematic a 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 
 companions and took them into the front shop, 
 meditating upon the astonishing sluggishness of this 
 shop, where even Mrs. Barclay had not yet pene- 
 trated 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 the library were like old friends. 
 For and things like these do strangely remain 
 known, yet for a time, unrelated I spent a sum- 
 mer in this village fifteen years ago. 
 
 263
 
 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-pro- 
 duction is scarcely possible. In the circumstances 
 Mr. Hodgson might have included 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, 
 264
 
 Mr. Ralph Hodgson 
 
 Tumbling in twenty rings 
 Into the grass. 
 
 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 linnet's lung, 
 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 dark- 
 ening 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 
 
 265
 
 Books in General 
 
 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 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, 
 
 21 hill as loud as he, 
 
 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, 
 266
 
 Mr. Ralph Hodgson 
 
 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, 
 
 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 characteristic in the sim- 
 plicity of their language. 
 
 267
 
 Double Misprints 
 
 i 
 
 TAKE the following paragraph from the Con- 
 ner sville (Ind.) Herald: 
 
 " 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 Indian- 
 apolis, 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 re- 
 member another which also was perpetrated in 
 America but which has not quite so convincing 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 brought him to the office 
 with a tig stick and a demand that the paragraph 
 should be reprinted with the offensive remark cor- 
 rected. It was: but another misprint crept in and 
 the word appeared as " bottle-scarred." Every one 
 who has dealings with the Press occasionally cor- 
 rects, amid the mass of quite meaningless " literals," 
 a misprint that really makes some sort of sense. 
 268
 
 Double Misprints 
 
 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 be- 
 ing so extremely apt. 
 
 269
 
 The History of Earl Fumbles 
 
 THE late Earl (Eorl?) Fumbles was of lowly 
 birth. He was born in the thorp 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 under- 
 slinkings, and soon became amazingly wealthy. An 
 earldom followed; though it is markworthy 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 bode- 
 word 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 cunning 
 in Kin-lore, and in his fair wonestead at Fumbles 
 270
 
 The History of Earl 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}'^ 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 Kiev. William Barnes 
 (of Dorset), who asked his countrymen to call a 
 perambulator a " child-wain " and an omnibus a 
 " folk-wain." " What many speakers and writers," 
 Ke remarks, ' l even to-day, call English, is no English 
 at all but sheer French. Nevertheless, 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: 
 
 271
 
 Books in General 
 
 " 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 en- 
 tirely. 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 in- 
 cluding in his list of u loan-words " words which we 
 hardly ever use. There are a few. Only a scientist 
 would say " acephalous " when he meant " head- 
 less " ; and the general public does not need to be 
 warned to say " grind," " bristly," " stalkless," and 
 " barefooted," instead of " comminute," " aristate," 
 " acaulescent," and " discalced." It would never 
 dream of saying acaulescent. Where our author 
 errs is where he would inevitably err: in suggest- 
 ing 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 disap- 
 proves. 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 
 272
 
 The History of Earl Fumbles 
 
 " 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 "; " back- 
 jaw " for " retort "; " handmaid " for " servant"; 
 " outganger " for "emigrant"; " wanhope " (a 
 most beautiful word, I admit) for " despair " ; 
 "scald" or "songsmith" for "poet"; " hight " 
 or "yclept" for "denominated"; " uplooking " 
 for " aspiring " ; " fourwinkled " for " quadrangu- 
 lar"; and, above all, to replace "depilatory" by 
 "hair-bane." " Ereold " and " foreold " for 
 " ancient " are no longer possible; and the man who 
 
 273
 
 Books in General 
 
 should say that the King was crowned and be- 
 smeared in Westminster Abbey would be quite un- 
 able 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 be- 
 cause 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 pro- 
 posing " hand-grip " for portmanteau, our word- 
 loresman 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; 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 " intes- 
 tines," 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 
 274
 
 The History of Earl Fumbles 
 
 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. 
 
 275
 
 On Destroying Books 
 
 44 T T says in the paper " that over two million vol- 
 umes 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 them? But 
 most people, especially non-bookish people, are very 
 reluctant to throw away anything 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 be- 
 cause 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 
 276
 
 On Destroying Books 
 
 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 " treas- 
 ures " (as the Press will call them) to a Public Insti- 
 tution. 
 
 But it is not always easy to destroy books. They 
 may not have as many lives as a cat, but they cer- 
 tainly 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. 
 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 land- 
 ings. The difficulty with this was that the larger 
 
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 Books in General 
 
 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 Guards- 
 man 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 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 
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 On Destroying Books 
 
 I have swag in this sack." I was not seriously dis- 
 turbed, as I knew that I could bear investigation, 
 and tRat 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 sus- 
 piciously 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 rumina- 
 tion and unconcern. The pedestrian came by me 
 without looking at me. It was a tramp, who had 
 other 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 meas- 
 ured 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 m the water. Surely, and not without 
 reason, whoever was within sight and hearing (and 
 
 279
 
 Books in General 
 
 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, sum- 
 moning up my courage to take the plunge and quail- 
 ing 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 Embankment 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 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, bet- 
 ter 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 
 280
 
 On Destroying Books 
 
 through the pitchy dark, and subsiding at last on the 
 ooze of the bottom, there to lie forlorn and forgot- 
 ten 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. 
 
 THE END 
 
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